The Open & Connected Workplace: Team Collaboration at Booz Allen Hamilton
www.office.com/setup Blogs: In order to stay competitive in today’s world, teams need to connect and share with each other more than ever before. On March 28th, we had the pleasure of hosting Rob Koplowitz from Forrester Research and Walton Smith from Booz Allen Hamilton in a live webinar where they discussed why organizations are turning to enterprise social and how they are using it to help their teams work more openly and efficiently.
Rob discussed how communication is changing, and how we’re accessing and interacting with information in new ways–incredibly, 66% of information workers in North America and Europe already work remotely.* The shift to cloud-based software and platforms is definitely contributing to some of these changes. The old way of building software involved engineers, months of coming up with specs, running Beta programs, and debugging. The time from idea to ship could take years. So the introduction of the cloud–and social–to the Enterprise is enabling companies to innovate and move to market faster than ever before. The cloud provides anytime, anywhere access which is essential to our increasingly mobile work environments; today employees can quickly and easily access a range of business systems, information and expertise from anywhere in the world. Our shift to cloud-based platforms and the introduction of working openly with social are changing the way teams collaborate.
Take, for example, Booz Allen Hamilton, a leading provider of management and technology consulting services. The company has over 26,000 employees worldwide, with over 71% of their employees working on-site with customers, which often limits their access to company resources.** But in order to provide the best service to their clients, consultants need to be able to quickly and easily access information and expertise. Booz Allen recently integrated Yammer as a social layer across business tools because the cloud-based platform enables consultants world-wide to collaborate virtually. When on-site with clients and working through a project, employees can now post questions to Yammer and, because of Yammer’s open nature, find the required expertise they need quickly. Since Yammer is cloud-based, they can access via any device whether they’re traveling and on mobile or using a client device.
Not only has Yammer been instrumental in connecting remote project workers, it also kept employees around the world connected during Hurricane Katrina. When the natural disaster occurred many people were unable to leave their homes, and over 14,000 workers were trying to log on to the company network from home. This massive and unexpected spike in traffic caused system-wide outages, which meant communication was down as well. The Booz Allen IT team quickly turned to Yammer and started posting regular status announcements to keep employees informed. They were also able to help direct them to resources, so consultants could continue to service their clients during the disaster.
In today’s rapidly changing mobile work environment, employees need a new way to connect and collaborate openly across organizational boundaries. Would you like to work more efficiently with your team? Watch the replay and discover more ideas for how you can drive team productivity at your company.
Catch the webinar recording here (available until June 26th)
View the slides:
*Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey, Q1 2011 ** Customer quote
Original Post: https://blogs.office.com/2013/04/09/the-open-connected-workplace-team-collaboration-at-booz-allen-hamilton/
